Insomniac Says Spider-Man: Miles Morales Will Be About Half The ...

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Insomniac says Spider-Man: Miles Morales will be about half the length of the original

Confirming reports about the scope of the PS5 launch title

Confirming reports about the scope of the PS5 launch title

by Nick StattCloseNick StattSenior Producer, Decoder

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Jun 18, 2020, 4:55 PM UTC

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is a Senior Producer on Decoder. Previously, he reported on the technology and gaming industries for more than a decade.

Insomniac Games has confirmed its upcoming PlayStation 5 launch title, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, will be about half the length of the original game. In a blog post published Thursday, creative director Brian Horton said the game would be roughly the size of 2017’s Uncharted: The Lost Legacy, which, since its release, has become an industry reference point for talking about the scope and length of narrative expansions in games. The Lost Legacy clocked in at about 7 to 10 hours of play time, according to data from HowLongToBeat.com, and was about half the size of the Uncharted game it was based on.

The Lost Legacy reference was first used by Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier in a post last week confirming the game would be a standalone title and not an expansion of 2018’s Spider-Man, following confusion from a Sony executive’s interview with The Telegraph. It would seem Insomniac has been using the example internally for some time now, which would explain why the source quoted in the Bloomberg report made the same comparison. (That or Horton and the team feel comfortable doing so publicly now that the reference is already out there.)

“You’ll experience a full story arc with Miles, one that’s more akin to a game like Uncharted: The Lost Legacy.”

“We know a lot of you want to know how big this game is. Our team at Insomniac has been working incredibly hard to bring you a fantastic Miles Morales adventure since we concluded development on Marvel’s Spider-Man. You’ll experience a full story arc with Miles, one that’s more akin to a game like Uncharted: The Lost Legacy in terms of overall scope,” Horton writes. “Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales is an important, heartfelt, emotional and essential experience to expanding the Marvel’s Spider-Man universe. And we hope it will be for you as well.”

None of this is too surprising. It would be an astonishing feat — one likely involving grueling hours and workplace crunch — for Insomniac, which Sony only acquired as one of its internal studios last August, to put out a full-fledged sequel and PS5 launch title in less than two years. It makes much more sense that a Miles Morales-focused standalone game in the style of a larger, richer expansion would be what we’re getting instead. It lets Sony and Insomniac show off the PS5 hardware with a follow-up to one of the most technically impressive games on the PS4, and it gives consumers who buy the new hardware on launch day something to look forward to.

As for how long exactly Spider-Man: Miles Morales will be, we can run some estimates. The Lost Legacy was about half the length of Uncharted 4: Thief’s End, which came in at around 15 to 20 hours based on HowLongToBeat data. Completionist runs for both games pushed those play times up to 15 to 20 and 30 to 40 hours, respectively.

Those numbers should align with Spider-Man’s length. The original 2018 game takes about 15 to 20 hours to beat the main story on average. But the difference is that Spider-Man featured an expansive open world and tons of collectibles and other ways to spend your time in ways Uncharted games never did. So a main playthrough of the original Spider-Man could take as long as 35 hours if you took your time. If you wanted to collect and unlock everything, that could take a leisurely player as long as 50 hours. I’d expect the new Spider-Man to have anywhere between five to 10 hours of story and then a whole lot of fun side quests and collectibles that make the experience quite a bit longer.

Either way, players will be getting a decently sized narrative Spider-Man game featuring an all-new character, and that sounds pretty great any way you look at it. Horton also says the game will feature a bunch of PS5 advantages:

We are also excited for the game to demonstrate the power of PlayStation 5 this holiday. Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales will show off near-instant loading, ray-tracing, 3D audio and the DualSense controller. We’ve upgraded our characters with 4D scans and improved skin shading for more realistic looking characters and spline-based hair that moves far more naturally. Many of the city’s assets have also been updated to take advantage of the new console. As you experience Miles’s story, you’ll see, hear, and feel things in a whole new way, all thanks to PS5.

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